The raise comes amid a pandemic-fueled ecommerce boom that has made the company’s products even more valuable to customers, according to Chief Executive Ben Eachus.
“The shift to ecommerce has really accelerated in the last year,” Eachus said. “These trends already existed, but the change is happening over a shorter period of time.”
Eachus said that the Flowspace platform processed 10 times as many orders in 2020 as it did in 2019.
Not all of that increase came from a surge in ecommerce sales. Flowspace also added customers last year and partnered with new warehouses.
Eachus said the company, which was founded in 2016, already operates in one of the nation’s largest networks of warehouses, where its software is used to facilitate shipping logistics for direct-to-consumer orders.
“The way to think about us is that our software picks up after someone clicks ‘purchase’ online,” Eachus said. “It routes orders to the correct fulfillment center, and we also provide software to warehouses that instructs employees how to pick and pack an order.”
Eachus formerly handled supply chain logistics at Playa Vista-based direct-to-
consumer retailer The Honest Co. Inc. He said that experience convinced him there was a need for a software product to streamline warehouse operations and give small businesses tools to compete with massive online retailers like Amazon.com Inc.
“I was really confronted with the challenges that I want to solve with Flowspace,” Eachus said. “If you look at the software running in warehouses today, most of it was built for
business-to-business distribution. Now, brands need to figure out a way to ship tens of thousands of products per day to millions of households.”
Eachus said the new funding Flowspace has raised will allow the company to scale up to meet the needs of its growing customer base and enhance its software offerings to better track and anticipate the shipping needs of clients as online orders continue to rise, which he says is the next challenge brands face.
